5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs

Introduction

 Introduction I will not get bagged on a rock. —Ghostface Killah, “Run,” The Pretty Toney Album, 2004 In all of rap’s gangster mythology there is perhaps no more overused imagery than Brian De Palma’s 1983 movie, Scarface, especially its last scene. In it, Al Pacino, in a paranoid frenzy after snorting scoops of cocaine arranged like mountains on his desk, charges onto his balcony with a military issue M-16 rifle—complete with grenade launcher—to face a small army of rival drug dealers. Before he finally falls face first into the fountain below, his body is literally perforated by bullets and sent through the railing by a shotgun blast to his back. By the time Tony Montana, Pacino’s character, died, he had become, by all accounts, a cocaine kingpin, having moved what probably amounted to tons of cocaine. Tony Montana’s kingpin status and his ultraviolent death, therefore, have provided rap artists with a ready-made model of gangster heroism. And, indeed, the adoption of Scarface as an icon by self-consciously gangsta rappers is an easy connection to make. After all, how much more gangster can one get? Even given the seeming obviousness of adopting Tony Montana as a hero, Ghostface Killah’s promise—which he makes in the same song from which the above epigraph was drawn—to “die with the heart of Scarface” in order to avoid getting arrested for the equivalent of one sugar packet worth of crack cocaine seems extreme. Tony Montana, that is, died for moving tons, not grams. Perhaps, then, Ghostface’s claims—along with those of countless other rap artists—are to be interpreted simply as the exaggerated boasts of an overactive imagination. Such exaggerations are all the more apparent because—as a major supplier of powder cocaine, the substance from which crack is ultimately derived—Tony Montana  x Introduction never sold crack. Crack dealing, in opposition to the cocaine kingpin mythology of Scarface, has always been a low-level enterprise—a retail operation dependent upon the importation of its parent substance, powder . And here lies the primary problem that this book addresses: there is actually nothing “easy” or “merely” sensationalistic about the connection many rappers make between Scarface and crack cocaine. In fact, that connection was made for them long before they ever rapped about it. More precisely, this book examines a number of interlocking contradictions at the heart of the U.S. government’s punishment structure for crack that, together, comprise a highly elastic form of reasoning through which, in a strange turn, mere couriers of an inherently impure form of cocaine came to be treated as if they were the kingpins of global criminal organizations moving massive quantities of lethally pure drugs. Thisbook,thus,examinestheprofoundsymbolicconsequencesofcrack’s paradoxical punishment structure, although it does so from “outside” of policy. Instead, I focus on the degree to which crack cocaine emerged as a primary symbolic referent through the development of an important reflexive lyrical stance that many rap artists in the 1990s took toward their own commercialization. In doing so, they became, in essence, products that “talked back” to their producers, as well as to a music industry system that has been consistently perceived as being duplicitous and humiliating. Out of rap’s confrontation with the industry that produced it, crack became a lethal logic of work: a grammar of social analysis in which exploited creative labor—as well as the possibilities of sustaining family and community life that such labor, it was hoped, might create—figures as central. For me, the emotional force of these lyrical critiques came into full relief while I was performing with an independent, multiethnic New York City–based rap group that came of age during the early and mid1990s . As part of an influential underground movement, we made music throughout the eastern United States, often recording with, opening for, or producing a number of well-known rap and jazz artists, including KRS-One, Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Sadat X, O.C., Tha Alkaholiks, Special Ed, MF Grimm, Freestyle Fellowship, and Lester Bowie, among others. Because one of our founding members and main producers was a French-American who maintained strong connections overseas, we also recorded with a number of European artists—including Faf Larage and Shurik’N from France, and Main Concept from Germany—and performed regularly at jazz and hip hop festivals, as well as in smaller clubs and venues across the continent and in the United Kingdom. [18.218...